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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24026314">Ne regarde pas en arrière</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/blogotron9000/pseuds/blogotron9000'>blogotron9000</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Phantom of the Opera, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Absolutely not "Love Never Dies"-compliant lol, Childbirth, Deaf Character, Domestic Disputes, F/M, Fade to Black, Feelings Realization, Gen, Married Couple, Married Life, Married Sex, Military, No Raoul-bashing, Normal Life, Postpartum Depression, Poverty, Pregnancy, Pregnant Sex, Raoulstine, Suicide Attempt, now with one thousand percent more references to historical french socialists, reference to abortion, war is hell etc.</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 01:20:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,317</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24026314</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/blogotron9000/pseuds/blogotron9000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>After the scandal of Christine's time at the Opera Populaire has faded, ordinary life goes on. After the de Chagny family disinherits its willful youngest son, Raoul serves with the Foreign Legion in Indochina and returns home stripped of his health, his hearing, and his illusions. Christine makes ends meet by tutoring, but cannot help but miss the music. Is this the life they fought for? </p><p>Sometimes love is easy; sometimes it is a great deal of work, and it is not of less value for that.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>39</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. C'est ainsi</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>September arrives in Lyon on the last hot, humid breath of summer. As schoolchildren, returned from the August holiday, scurry home from classes; as bourgeois housewives bustle into shops and behind prams; as the silk workers emerge from their ending shifts in the workshops of Saint-Georges; Christine de Chagny takes rushed little steps to the funicular station.</p><p><br/>
Little steps. Little everything, she feels her life these days to be. The little children of Saint-Just and Fourvière, whom she tutors in music and Swedish-accented English; the little Opera Nouvel in city-center, which lacks the joyful ostentation of the Palais Garnier. The little apartment, at the top of a little winding staircase, four stories above the street.</p><p><br/>
A better woman would find a way to be grateful, even for these little mercies. Despite the circumstances that oblige her to find paying work, tutelage for the city’s families of means is no mean labor. Though the apartment is small, its rent and keeping are not too dear, especially not here in Lyon compared to the costly streets of Paris. Here, too, there is only the whiff of scandal still hanging about the de Chagny name, compared to the veritable miasma of it that must be navigated in Parisian society. And though the Opera Nouvel is but small and stolid and serviceable, when she sings from its stage, she forgets where she is entirely, she loses herself in the burning-brightness of the arc lamps. Her world is still full of music, whatever else has bled away.</p><p><br/>
And she might be grateful, too, for the sort of work that she has: gentle, artful. Safe. A man in similar circumstances, a man who has lost the title and good name against which he might have traded for professional placement--a man such as that would have fewer options by far. Despite the day’s heat, Christine clutches her light coat more tightly against her chest. She has not entirely convinced herself yet that a commission in the Foreign Legion is more than an escape from their shared circumstances. Does he still love the woman who pulled him down with her when she fell from grace?</p><p><br/>
No. This is simple projection. Her husband has never been shy with words of love. He saw what he wanted, and what he wanted was her. There is only one of them who has never looked the other in the eye and said earnestly, joyfully, resoundingly, “I love you”, and that one is not Raoul de Chagny.</p><p>She loves him. Does she not? She cares for him, desires his happiness and well-being ... there is love, and there is <em>love</em>, and who has ever granted her the space, the opportunity, to learn the difference?</p><p><br/>
The funicular car is still at the Saint-Just station and she nearly sobs in relief as she pays her fare and climbs aboard. The Pomeroy children are eager to learn, hating to be parted from their teacher; worse, their mother is eager to chatter. Christine can ill afford to be rude to her employer but neither does she dare to offend the director of the National Opera by whose grace she is permitted to sing. The funicular fare is a necessity, she tells herself, though it pangs her to spare the few décimes. She has been late to afternoon rehearsals more than once before.</p><p><br/>
A young gentleman kindly empties his seat upon Christine’s boarding, and she gratefully settles into the space and rests her weary feet for the trip across the Saône and into the First Arrondisement.</p><p>She loves her safety. She loves what freedom she has come to have: freedom from darkness, from fear, from uncertainty. How can she know for certain that she loves her husband when he is not here beside her? How can two people grow together when they are parted by weeks of travel, by thousands of miles over land or sea?</p><p><br/>
With the river’s cool air brushing the curls away from her face, she slips just for a moment beneath the dark surface of dreams. It is only the conductor’s cry of the Bellecour station’s name that sends her scrambling up, rushing out into the street with the press of other Lyonnais.</p><p>At the steps of the Opera Nouvel, Pauline Lefebvre catches up to her, bellowing, “Christine! Christine!” in such a way that would have turned heads among fashionable Parisians. How can a woman with such a charming bell-peal of a singing voice sound quite so much like a braying donkey? But Christine waits. A friend such as Mlle Lefebvre is another of the little things for which she must be grateful.</p><p>“Oh, Christine,” Pauline sighs, tucking her arm through Christine’s as they both turn again to the Opera’s entrance. “I cannot bear another afternoon of rehearsing Act II. If I must abide M. Duchesne’s buzzing again I will surely go mad.”</p><p>“Will you now! You aren’t the one who must share a stage with him for the Duo de la mouche. You ought to put wax plugs in your ears until the end of the scene.”</p><p>“Christine! You wicked thing. It is a dreadful opera, though, isn’t it? God save me from being cast in another farce.” Pauline’s version of a ladylike titter is also, somehow, rather donkey-like in its quality. Christine hides a smile. “Come, what news have you? Any word from M. le Sous-lieutenant?”</p><p>“I have had no word from M. de Chagny since his company arrived in Cochinchina.” Christine’s smile has fled now. It has been six months since Raoul departed by train for the port at Marseille and from there across the world. How glowingly he spoke then, of the opportunity to help modernize and bring security to China’s misfortunate neighbors in Cochinchina and Indochina. “I am certain he is well.”</p><p>“How romantic, to be sent to the Orient! He must be very brave, to take up arms so.”</p><p>It is not, Christine thinks, <em>brave</em>, precisely, to accept the role into which life has thrust you, once scandal-tainted romance has severed you from family name and fortune. To see the only way forward and to step onto it. That is what she has done, is it not, and how can it ever be <em>brave</em>, to sit at the pianoforte and teach a silkshop-owner’s children how to sing scales? But she has seen Raoul de Chagny at the end of a scarlet noose, using his last breaths to cry out for her freedom, and so she answers with certainty, if not directness: “Yes. My husband is very brave.”</p><p><br/>
The rehearsal goes well--it is not so dreadful, truly, to pretend to be seduced by the king of the gods in the form of a giant golden fly, it is good to laugh, just for a spell, when the the director calls for a pause and Jupitre becomes M. Duchesne once more. Before Christine knows it, rehearsal is over: time has no meaning, minutes skip lightly without lingering, while the music plays. But all too soon she is stepping lightly down the Opera steps into the street, buying the night’s bread, onions for soup, and a slender bit of hard cheese. With her shopping under her arm, she walks home. Her own two feet are sufficient to carry her as far as Croix-Rousse. The looms of the silk workshops sing her down the streets until at last she reaches her own building and climbs the stairs, leaving the sound of carts and chatter behind.</p><p>At the apartment, she stops, key in hand. An envelope has been inexpertly thrust beneath the door. A very singular envelope, with the markings of the Foreign Legion upon the visible corner.</p><p>This is no personal note from M. de Chagny and she has only just had his most recent pension.</p><p>There are only so many reasons that the Legion should direct correspondence to an officer’s wife.</p><p>It takes her two tries to get the key into the lock, so badly do her hands tremble. The envelope tears ever so slightly as the door opens and she gasps, as if the words might spill out through that rend and keep their secrets forever. The day’s shopping goes tumbling, the bread’s crust cracking, the onions bouncing down the hall. Christine drops to her knees, drawing the envelope free. MME DE CHAGNY, it says, all capital letters, stamped out by one of these new typewriters and not by any human hand. She pulls her finger into the tear that she has already made and rends the envelope in two, reading before she has the telegram paper inside fully unfolded.</p><p><br/>
She presses it flat on the floorboards, reading it again, and then again once more, unable to believe the words written there. How can there be room in her small life for a great joy? She will find the space to open up for it.</p><p><br/>
Raoul is coming back to her.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Nous aurons du silence</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Christine has no book of maps but she draws the world by memory from her childhood lessons and traces the route a ship might take, from the Bay of Tonquin through her half-imagined arrangement of Pacific islands, around the jagged arrow of British India and the Princely States, up the narrow mouth of the Red Sea and the yet narrower vein of the canal. From there into the familiar friendly waters of the Mediterranean, at last to kiss the rocky calanques at Marseille. She does not know the peculiar capillaries of the rail lines that bind France together, north to south, so she draws only a straight thick line, from the bottom of her lumpy French hexagon stabbing up toward the country’s heart. Back to Lyon.</p><p>She can trace the route but the days she can only guess at. Weeks roll over her like the icy tides of her homeland, sometimes buoying her up--home, he is coming home--and sometimes threatening to submerge her--injured in the course of duty, the telegram had said, but how gravely, if they are sending him back; will he make it back to her at all? What if he should succumb, alone, on a dank humid ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean?</p><p>How could she ever begin to mourn a man she never truly, properly, came to know? Would she learn how, in time? There have been too many ghosts in her life as it is.</p><p>No, she promises herself, he is strong and he is stubborn, he will come home to her, and however war has wounded him she will carry him back into light and life, she will sing the soul back into his broken body, can she not do that much, at least, for her husband? She can, she should, she must, she will; yet other dark fantasies steal her sleep at night: a sudeden storm strong enough to capsize an unwitting freighter; infection, treachery from the English naval installations of the Raj, infection, consumption, a thousand deadly things which all sound equally likely from her cold lonely bed. </p><p>Though she has not prayed for years, not since God’s angels became so knotted up for her with the fallen principalities of hell, she does so now, silent pleas rising to heaven on the rhythm of her footsteps, with the chopping of the carrots and haricots for her supper. She would do, will do, anything to have him back safely once again.</p><p>Pauline Lefebvre is full of fantasies of her own. “Perhaps he’ll have a scar,” she says, while divesting herself of the goddess Pomone’s purpled robes after an evening’s performance. “A very small one, I should think, but very dashing. On the side of one cheek, perhaps.” She angles an eyebrow roguishly at Christine. “Or perhaps one for Madame’s eyes only?”</p><p>“You’re dreadful,” Christine says, but there is no joke in it, nor any venom either. She is too weary and there is nothing left of herself to give, after she has scraped herself empty on the stage, after she has spent a morning trying to be a kinder, wiser Angel of Music for her coterie of wide-eyed pupils. Pauline does not reply, but her fingers brush Christine, briefly, on the back of the wrist before she turns away to put her wig in its box.</p><p>The second telegram arrives two days after the final performance of <em>Orphée aux enfers</em>. A brief stab of disappointment: Christine would have liked for him to hear her sing at the Opéra Nouvel; she had hoped the director, who has been pleased with the show’s reviews, might have granted him an evening’s seat, for theater tickets are surely beyond the means of this little sawn-off branch of the de Chagny family now. </p><p>But this is a foolish fancy that passes quickly: Raoul is home and he will hear her sing, now, whenever he wishes it. He will find some other employment, with the glow of his foreign service upon him, and they need never be parted again.</p><p>She puts on her coat against the bite of the coming winter and half-walks, half-runs south through the arrondisement, not minding the stares of the gentlefolk nor the jeers and invitations of men not so gentle. At last she finds herself before the grand white face of the Hôtel-Dieu, its line of trees along the Rhone picked of leaves by the chill from the river. The building smells of sickness and poverty; the wind in the bare branches sounds like a death-rattle. Color bleaches from Christine’s face but she hurries inside.</p><p>A veritable chorus line of busy, battle-faced nurses direct her, piecemeal, to the branch of the building which serves as the veteran’s hospital. There, a soft-faced orderly stops when she plucks at his uniform sleeve. At her halting request, he takes pity, looking in the book of unit charges to find the room assigned to the sous-lieutenant, and deposits her beside its open door.</p><p>Her hand raised to knock, Christine hesitates. She can see two beds inside, one tidily made, one with its blankets bunched up around a pair of legs. Is he sleeping? She peers inside.</p><p>Behind the door, a wheelchair is parked beside a small table. A man leans over a basin of water, peering into a shaving mirror. She can see his face reflected in the glass as he nicks one fresh-shaven cheek and wicks away the blood with a swipe of his thumb. If he comes away from his service with a dashing scar upon his face, it shall only be because of his clumsiness with his razor. “Raoul,” she cries, her hand upon her heart.</p><p>But he does not turn to look at her. He rinses the razor, sets it aside. He dries his face with a towel. “Raoul,” she repeats again, hurt, puzzled. Did he hope not to be caught in his shirt-sleeves, at his toilette? Though he is a proud man, he has never coldly turned that pride against <em>her</em> as a shield or a weapon, and anyway are they not man and wife? She has seen this and more of him by now. </p><p>And yet he does not turn.</p><p>She leans into the door-frame. At this flicker of movement, his eyes catch hers in the shaving-mirror. His reflection shifts: joy, first, and for a moment Christine’s ashen heart leaps like a phoenix against the cage of her chest. Then dismay writes new lines in his face. Only then does he grasp the wheels of his chair to turn to her. </p><p>Only then does she understand:</p><p>She will never sing for him again.</p><p>“Raoul,” she says again, despairing now herself, and though he cannot hear her, he watches her mouth, and when her lips move he sighs too: “<em>Christine</em>.”</p><p>She crosses the room in two quick steps and buries her face against his neck, folds him in her embrace. It is such a small thing to surrender, is it not, only one bright facet of their life together, if it means having him back--</p><p>But as his arms go around her in turn, thin and feather-light, she cannot bring herself to think that she has gotten her husband back <em>safely</em>. The bargain is broken from the onset. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. La mort m'apparaît souriante</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>NOTE: This is the chapter in which the tagged suicide attempt is referenced, in case you're not in the right place for that right now &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Vaillancourt children are unruly during their Wednesday afternoon lesson. Little Mimi, the elder, has not practiced <em>La queue leu leu</em> on the pianoforte as Christine had instructed the week before, and Max, the baby, pitches a tantrum when asked to sing the first verse of <em>Sur le pont d’Avignon</em> with Christine’s accompaniment. It is not like them--they are dear things, usually, but their mother is in her confinement with a third child and they wear their frustration and fear on their round little faces. Once, Christine would have passed them each a penny candy when she left them at lesson’s end. But there is no money for these little luxuries now, so she gives them each a kind word and a kiss upon their yellow curls before she starts for home.</p>
<p>After she buys eggs and potatoes for dinner, she turns homeward. She walks slowly. She knows it, and despises herself for it. But she is tired and the last light of the spring’s early days still lingers on rooftops and she does not wish, not yet, to return to the small dark lonely apartment.</p>
<p>She does not wish, wretched woman that she is, to return to her husband so soon. </p>
<p>The past has emerged in scraps, passed in scribbled messages, in the staccato-slurred rhythm of Raoul’s limp, in the sudden stillnesses when his gaze goes dark and distant and whatever he sees, it is not her face across their dinner-table. Christine knows so little of it all: there was a shell, during the fighting in Tonquin, one which detonated too close to the sous-lieutenant’s head; lacerations that healed over on the surface while leaving damage both invisible and ineffaceable within. Shrapnel, too, which shattered the bones of his left knee.</p>
<p>The doctors have instructed him to walk, and so he has done, fighting gravity all the way down the four sets of stairs, eking out two or three painstaking blocks over icy sidewalks as he leans ever more heavily upon the cane--he will not avail himself of Christine’s arm, however he sweats and shakes, and if she offers it, he snarls his refusal--and then the slow ascent back to the apartment. </p>
<p>His infirmity does not allow him to refuse her help in dressing and undressing; at least, when they are not both so weary that he retires to bed in his shirt-sleeves and drawers. Christine’s fingers read parts of the story he does not speak, in the hard ridges of scars: a wicked craze left by the shrapnel’s sting, the neat straight line of the surgeon’s scalpel. But he insists on performing these operations in the dark, with only a few shreds of the street-lamps’ harsh light scratching their way in through the threadbare drapery. Even here she is not permitted the tale’s full scope.</p>
<p>The sun is setting and Christine walks faster. There was a time when it was easy to walk down the street and not notice the cut of a new dress on a gentlewoman stepping down from a cab, nor feel her mouth water as she passes a café window with tarte tatin or lapin à la cocotte, when she would never have stared at a pair of good kid gloves clasped carelessly in elegant fingers. It is not, she thinks, clutching at her shopping-basket with laundry-roughened hands, that she desires fine things for their own sake. It is what they represent: the bouquet of roses cast at the prima donna’s feet, the paste gems and precise embroidery of a well-made costume. </p>
<p>She has, of course, been obliged to beg a leave of absence from the National Opera. While she may fit in episodes of tutoring to complement the meager pension of a discharged sous-lieutenant, caring for her convalescent husband is a demanding job that does not admit of such competition as the life of a lead soprano. When she sings, now, she sings scales and play-songs, pedagogically suitable, unchallenging, rote. </p>
<p>At home she rarely lifts her voice. Once, while doing the week’s mending, she found herself singing the aria from <em>Lucia de Lammermoor</em>. Her husband sat by the window, looking at nothing, unaware, or so she thought, of the movement of her lips, the lift of her voice. As she struck the final lines, she glanced his way, and found him staring not at the street below but at the empty glass in his hand which rang with the vibrations of the aria’s closing high note.</p>
<p>Resentment is a small hard seed planted in Christine’s heart and watered with her tears.</p>
<p>He has not reached for her since he came home, either. Not with the shy gentleness of their first embraces, after their little wedding at the mairie. Not with the too-brief joy and fire they grew into, as they learned one another’s bodies. Before he left. Before he left <em>her</em>.</p>
<p>Perhaps she should reach for him, in turn, but she does not know how; does not know if that would be worse, in the end. In any case his pride and hers both raise sturdy obstacles against that course.</p>
<p>At least they have had the pleasant occasion to receive guests, now and again. A certain doctor from the veterans’ service, to inspect his patient’s recovery; or an old friend from Parisian society, passing through the south. Mlle Lefebvre and her roommate from the corps de ballet (her wife in all but name, of course) visit when they may, bringing bright chatter and colorful flowers that only serve to further mark out the drab lifelessness of the apartment. Christine is glad of the company and Raoul performs the role of gracious host and husband for the duration of these entertainments, gamely trying to read lips, scribbling notes to interject.</p>
<p>Then the guests leave and it is silence once more.</p>
<p>Is this the dream for which they both sacrificed so much? Christine’s life is drudgery and her husband’s is pain. </p>
<p>In the end, she has married a ghost after all.</p>
<p>She does not stop when she reaches the door of the apartment building, as if to lose momentum now would be to surrender entirely to the inertia of her loneliness. She keeps moving, one foot in front of another, all the way up the stairs until she arrives at her own door breathless and sweating.</p>
<p>She realizes then that she has forgotten the day’s bread. She will think of that, later; how things might have been different if she had stopped in at one more shop, if she had turned away and walked back down the stairs. But life is a series of choices, and this time, weariness chooses for her. She puts her key in the lock. It turns.</p>
<p>There is a flutter of movement, brief and empty, white shirt-sleeves against the gray gloom. “Raoul?” she says, foolishly, for how can he know to answer? She lights the kerosene lamp beside the door, and--</p>
<p>Did she think her life was too small before? It is all crushed down to this one moment, a slash of red, a glint of shattered glass. It sings through her, like a single staccato note pulled from a frightened violin.</p>
<p>Again that flutter of movement, as if he can hide what she has already seen. She upends a chair as she flies across the room. Her shoe catches the stained shard and sends it spinning across the floor; she falls on her knees beside him where he sprawls with his back against the wall, his bloodied hand in his lap. </p>
<p>“I couldn’t finish it,” he says. He speaks carelessly, hammering blunt the sharp sounds of consonants and unable to hear how the words soften and run together. “Too much the coward.”</p>
<p>The wound inside his arm is a brief one that stops short of the blue twitching veins. She pulls his hand into her lap so that her dress drinks away the blood. With her fingers, she covers the wound and presses it tightly. When she speaks, it is not carelessly; she cuts the words clearly with her teeth, she holds his eyes with the precise movements of her mouth. “It was not yours to finish.”</p>
<p>“I promised you your freedom.” He does not wince when she holds the wound more tightly. “Instead I became your chains.”</p>
<p>She does not do him the disservice of denying it. “Your death is not my freedom,” she says. He looks away. With her free hand she seizes his chin, making him watch her, making him capture her words. She is only a girl again, small and alone in the all-encompassing dark; he is but a boy and the scarlet line drawn between them is a tightening noose. “<em>Grief is a prison, too.</em>”</p>
<p>“Christine,” he says, “I love you,” and his tone makes the words into an apology. He clasps her fingers with his good hand; the other finds her elbow. The bandage of her stained dress pulls away but the blood has ceased to flow; he lays his face against her chest, she her cheek to his hair.</p>
<p>“And I love you,” she says, like an invocation, for as she speaks it aloud, she knows it to be true. There will be time to come to understand love in all its facets but this is the first one that she sees for what it is: this terror, the flash of something recognized only in the moment where it is believed to be lost.</p>
<p>Grief may be a prison, but the strength of two may be enough to prise the bars apart.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. C'est toi, toi qu'enfin je revois</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A fragile peace settles over the de Chagny household. They agree that she will return to the Opera when the new season begins. The love of one man is not enough to fill a life; and though her husband’s body will never fully heal, it is much mended from its worst state. “And I am not after all such an invalid that I cannot manage on my own,” Raoul insists. She does not tell him that his ability to cut bread or reach the water-pitcher is not the reason she dreads to leave him alone. She does not need to tell him; he knows.</p><p>While he remains confined, Raoul writes letters, writes them until his finger are stained black and his hands cramp. Letters to old contacts, society friends, officers with whom he served. Friendly notes, couched in nostalgic camaraderie; but before he closes each one out, he finds a way to mention in passing his desire of gainful work, the capacities which he still possesses.</p><p>Replies come, forthrightly and full of solicitous good will. No offer of employment is ever furnished. </p><p>Still, Raoul continues to write. And he writes more than letters, too. Over the weeks, a portrait of the Tonquin campaign emerges, brushed in broad strokes. He tells Christine, haltingly, of the resentful poor forced into rubber plantations and mines; of the shrinking stores of rice that fed local children and the ever-growing mountains of the stuff that filled westbound ships. Of a people not even permitted the dignity of speaking their own country’s name. </p><p>There are worse things, too, things he cannot abide to describe aloud. Starved children. Abused laborers. Malaria, dengue, typhus, snail fever, vast catalogs of hideous diseases that do not differentiate between the occupied and the occupier. Where he cannot speak, he writes, in opium-softened letters at first, and slowly, as pain recedes to a neap tide, in tidy even majuscule. The elegant flourish with which he once penned shy, tender missives has been lost to time.</p><p>“Modernization, they call it,” he says, looking up from the stained newspaper in which the evening meal’s fish was wrapped. “A mission of civilization.” His words are clipped but clear. “How often did I parrot the same lines myself? A comfortable lie young men tell themselves to protect the fortunes of tea importers and rubber-tyre makers.”</p><p>Christine sets the dishes in the pot of lukewarm water that she has carried up the stairs, and taps the table with damp fingers, drawing his eyes so that he knows to watch her mouth when she speaks. “A comfortable lie that old men tell the young, first, to convince them to lay down their lives.”</p><p>“Still. I was too easily convinced.” He frowns at the waterlogged wrapping. “Perhaps I will write a letter to the newspaper regarding M. Michelin’s precious rubber-trees.”</p><p>“What a revolutionary you sound like!” Christine smiles and wipes her hands with a rag. “If someone had told me on my wedding day that I was marrying a radical, I would have laughed.”</p><p>“But you were not--not at the time.” He folds the paper over, burying both piscatory dampness and dire tidings from the far side of the world in the middle. “I’m afraid I am much changed from the man you agreed to wed.”</p><p>“Not <em>entirely</em> changed, I hope.” She intends the words in jest, but there is too much truth inside for them to tumble lightly from her lips. They land heavily, felt where they are not heard. The breath stills in his chest and he does not move, watching her, scrying for meaning in more than the movement of her mouth now.</p><p>She sets the rag aside. She unties her apron and leaves that, too, upon the sideboard. She turns and walks to the bed in the corner and sits, hands gripping the counterpane.</p><p>Raoul stays, unmoving, for so long, too long. Christine watches the back of his neck, awaiting a sign, a shift, until frail hope founders and she knows herself for a fool. She closes her eyes against hot tears--of disappointment, of shame, of things too fierce and fleeting to pin a name to--just as wood scrapes wood.</p><p>Her eyes fly open. Raoul stands, weight on the cane, and takes a step toward her. Desire and fear are naked in his face as he pulls himself toward her. She wonders how much of the same he sees, mirrored in hers. </p><p>When he reaches to extinguish the kerosene’s trembling flame, she speaks, punctuating the word with a stomp of her foot that he feels through the floorboards: “No.”</p><p>He looks to her, uncertain. Doubt’s claws rake deep lines in his brow, lines that were not there a moment before.</p><p>“No.” She shakes her head and smiles again, through the tears that have not ceased to flow. How many times now have they nearly lost one another, and to so much greater forces than a moment’s misgiving? “I want to see you,” she says, and she holds out her hand.</p><p>The apartment is not so large as all that and he is close enough to take her hand in his free one. He lands beside her heavily, gasping a little, the cane clattering to the floor. His breath is close and warm on her neck. She grasps his wrist, puts his fingers on her waist. He takes her other hand and presses it to his chest, where his heart drums through the fabric of his shirt and waistcoat. When he leans forward, she lifts her face to meet him, as he brushes his lips over her wet eyes, as he paints her mouth with the salt of her own tears.</p><p>They undress each other like newlyweds again, mindful of each button, each hair-pin. How young and innocent they had been! Now, more than reticence slows them: torn clothes and lost pins are too dear an expense. </p><p>She weeps again to see the old scars with more than touch, by honest, unequivocal light. But weeping does not keep her from pressing him back upon the cool counterpane, from settling astride him, face to face, her hair enclosing them in its dark curtains so that there is no world outside of them, no moment but this, no light or heat to be had but what radiates from their own bodies, and that is enough, that is enough.</p><p>The household’s peace grows sturdier, aware of itself, solicitous of its own upkeep. Loneliness eases and even in the quiet moments the silence grows soft and comfortable in place of cool uncertainty. The letters continue to return, overflowing with well wishes and empty of promise. In the evenings, Christine and Raoul speculate on the impending announcement of the Opera’s upcoming season--“I should love to sing Leila in <em>Les pêcheurs de perles</em>,” Christine sighs, “think of the lovely costumes”--and feed each other the not-quite-spoiled bits of charcuterie and misshaped boudins that the butcher sells for décimes on the franc.</p><p>She begins to sing again, at home. Tentatively at first, but finding her way back to confidence and joy anew. The windows vibrate in their settings, the dishes and glasses hum in the cupboard. Raoul watches her in reflections, from around corners, as if he thinks to make himself known will break the spell.</p><p>The one other bright spot in their fortunes is that Christine’s tutoring work continues apace. Some of her employers, invoking the whispers of her convalescent war-hero husband, pass her name along to other Lyonnais parents. (She does not mention to Raoul the way in which she allows his undesired martyrdom to be traded upon; she is unhappy with it herself, she is sure that he would make himself ill over it.) Still, before long, she has nearly as many pupils as she can manage, not without causing herself conflicts against the next season of the Opera. Though the work keeps her criss-crossing the city from house to house, leaves her feet sore and weary by day’s end, she is glad of the little voices of the children, of her chance to guide their first foundering steps into music’s grand and welcoming kingdom.</p><p>It is quite by chance one day, as she coaches young Agathe Barbeau up and down an arpeggio in D major, that the door to the study crashes open. Christine startles, half-standing from the bench at Agathe’s side. “Excuse me, young man,” she says to the youth blinking at her from the doorway. She knew M. and Mme Barbeau had an elder child as well, but assumed age or gender had excused him from instruction in the finer arts. “Did you not hear the pianoforte?”</p><p>But he only shakes his head at her. His hands flash, darting back and forth in an arcane pattern at which Christine can only stare. She senses herself on the cusp of some terrible importance, unable yet to sense which way she will fall.</p><p>“Oh, just get your book then, Arnaud!” Agathe pipes, with all her usual petulance. Her hands are moving too, Christine realizes, over the keyboard but not touching it, a not-quite-mimicry of her brother’s motions. “I only get to see Mme de Chagny once a week and you’re <em>spoiling</em> it!”</p><p>He hurries into the room then, snatching a heavy tome off the shelf; his hands fly once more and Agathe yelps with eight-year-old indignation as he retreats behind the slammed door. “He’s so <em>rude</em>,” she tells Christine, and primly smooths down her pinafore. “I’m sorry, madame.”</p><p>“Your brother,” Christine says slowly, feeling her way through this moment. “He ... does not hear?”</p><p>“No, madame. He had the scarlet fever. Before I was born.”</p><p>“And you speak to him thus--” She imitates one of the gestures she saw pass between them, the opening and closing of an imaginary book. “With your hands?”</p><p>“Yes, madame.” Agathe’s lower lip pushes out when Christine says no more. “Madame? Which scales shall I do next?”</p><p>Christine snaps out of reverie. “That is enough technical work for now. You may show me your practice piece, please, and remember this time to mind the dynamics.”</p><p>As Agathe hesitantly coaxes music out of the pianoforte, Christine's soul loosens from her body and soars outward, skimming over a horizon newly broadened and beyond which a world of new possibilities lie.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Quel vague souvenir alourdit ma pensée</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the streets of Paris, ghosts flicker just outside Christine’s periphery. She tries not to look at them too closely, in case it makes them real. She sets Raoul’s hand on her arm as they step down from the train carriage, so that he puts more of his weight onto her, but also to remind herself of his nearness. She need not face the past alone. She surrenders to the strangeness, to the uncanny familiarity. </p><p>In the weeks before their departure from Lyon, their newfound and hard-won peace was put sorely to the test. Oh, the arguments they had, the shouting--Raoul refused at first to leave Lyon, when he learned that Christine’s offer of security from the Opera’s director would expire with the new season’s advent. There would be no guarantee of roles for her in another city, he would not take this from her--as if it were only a flimsy veil that could be ripped away, she replied in scorn, as if it were not <em>part</em> of her, the bravest and most joyful part, and who did M. de Chagny think he was, to be so powerful as to separate his wife from her own truest self?</p><p>And then of course there was the matter of money. Christine has offers of tutoring in Paris, thanks to her many gracious lyonnais employers, but not so much as to cover an apartment in the more expensive city of fashion and light. And then the price of train tickets, and of having their meager luggage brought over--it had taken weeks but at last Raoul had sat at the table and put pen to paper, asking his elder brother for aid. It had cost him something, to have to beg in this way, and that is a debt that cannot be repaid in the same way as the advance of a few hundred francs.</p><p>They have saved a bit of the Comte de Chagny’s cold generosity, enough to hire a cab to carry them from the rail station to the small building where they have secured living quarters--little more than a chambre de bonne, in all honesty, but mercifully only on the first floor, a single flight up from the street. </p><p>The cab that answers to Raoul’s raised hand is drawn by a single roan with a heavy step. <em>Order your fine horses</em>, Christine remembers a girl saying, a girl who stood on the opera-house roof with the wild wind in her hair. A girl who would have given anything for a glimmer of hope. Even love. Even that. If that child could see her now, what would she think of the bargain Christine has made of her life, a quiet life, far from the gleaming stage-lights--?</p><p>No. Christine refuses to defend her choices to the specter of her own past.</p><p>The horse’s hooves upon the pavement quicken to a cheerful musette. Coming from the south, the cab does not pass the Palais Garnier; Christine will not see, then, the banners that proclaim the autumn season, nor which soprano’s name is printed upon the programme. Her husband cannot buy her tickets anyway so her ignorance on this account is no great loss.</p><p>They do pass, one street over from Boulevard St-Michel, the French School for the Deaf. The hansom driver points it out, at Christine’s request, as the cab rolls past the nearest cross-street. Christine relays the information to Raoul.</p><p>“And there it is that I shall be made a man of letters,” he says, and squeezes her elbow. “Perhaps a man you could be proud, again, to stand beside.”</p><p>She makes sure he is watching her face. “I was never ashamed to have you at my side.”</p><p>A wry twist of his lips. “The shame, then, was mine.”</p><p>She strikes his hand free of her arm. “Then you are a foolish man, M. de Chagny. I wish you would not speak so.”</p><p>“I will endeavor to improve my comportment.” He offers her his hand once more and she settles back into the clasp of his fingers about her own. “I may be a fool. But I have always been <em>your</em> fool.”</p><p>Their old acquaintances in Paris are perhaps not entirely sure what to do with them. They receive invitations to a salon or two, from those members of society who either do not care what the Comte de Chagny thinks of their guest-lists, or those who enjoy the opportunity to take a poke at him by way of his younger brother. </p><p>They accept these invitations, the first two times; Christine feels small and shabby beside the ladies in their finery, and worse yet, entirely ignorant when the talk turns to the season’s fashions, the latest performance she has not seen or novel she has not heard of. Raoul looks little more comfortable, shut out of the conversation by moustaches that cover mouths and coffee-cups held too close to lips. On the occasions someone does make the effort to engage him, they swiftly find themselves with more of a debate on their hands than they bargained for, for M. de Chagny is unstinting with his opinions with regard to the fighting in Cochinchina and the persistence of the deplorable institution of human bondage in French holdings in West Africa.</p><p>Upon the third such request for their company, they send their polite regrets instead. After that, they are not asked back again--because of their shabbiness, or because of Raoul’s inflammatory rhetoric, or because they are unable to extend a reciprocal invitation, or because Parisian society has simply had enough of tweaking M. le Compte de Chagny ... it is impossible to say.</p><p>The only person from their life before who maintains a regular contact is Meg Giry--or rather, the Baroness Marguerite de Barbezac now--who insists that the de Chagnys visit for coffee at her husband’s Parisian house every month or so. When Christine apologizes for her inability to serve as hostess in kind, the baroness is absolutely aghast. “It is my pleasure to have you!” she cries. “You are the only ones I can talk to who remember the absolute madness of those days--Maman refuses to hear a word about it all and my husband dismisses it all as idle gossip.” </p><p>None of them ever mention the opera ghost himself directly, whether or not Meg’s husband the baron is present. To speak of him now, Christine thinks, would be to break the spell, to find herself back beside that gloomy lake, tasked again with the choice to pay the ferryman with her heart or her freedom. It is impossible not to imagine, starting over from scratch, that she might make things come out better a second time. It is impossible not to imagine that she might lose so much more. </p><p>She finds herself staring across the room, at the pianoforte by the window. Meg doesn’t even play, so far as she knows; she wonders if it is in tune, what it would sound like if she asked it to sing.</p><p>“It seems almost like a fairy tale sometimes, looking back, does it not?” Meg goes on, with a light laugh. Then she winces, and twirls her spoon in the dregs of her coffee. “No, that is not quite right, is it? It’s more like a sordid gothic drama, the kind written by those depressive Englishwomen, Mrs Mary Shelley and the rest.”</p><p>Christine looks around at the baroness’s drawing room with its porcelain coffee service, the heavy draperies, the polished pianoforte. If anyone should know a bit about fairy tales in the making, it is Meg Giry. “Not that either,” Christine says. Her hands speak as she does: she shapes the words slowly with her mouth so that her fingers can follow, she is new to this still and must pause and consider how to fit sign to thought. “It is too strange to be any kind of fiction.”</p><p>That wrings a laugh out of Meg. “You are too right!” she says, and calls for the maid to clear the coffee service.</p><p>Meg insists that she send the de Chagnys home by means of the baron’s carriage and driver, and because she speaks with her back to Raoul and Christine neglects to translate her words for his benefit, he is unaware of this arrangement until he is standing in front of the waiting carriage and unable to demur without giving offense. They ride in silence, facing one another, looking out opposite windows. “It has been lovely to reacquaint ourselves with Meg again,” she says, again supporting her speech with matched signs. “She seems happy, and I’m glad.”</p><p>Raoul frowns, obviously seeking hidden meanings in her words. She has never been the sort to bury unpleasant feelings in sweetness and make him go searching for them, but sometimes he searches anyway. “Are <em>you</em> happy, Christine?”</p><p>“Of course I am.” It’s true, isn’t it? Yet her fingers twist in her lap, plucking at a loose thread on her skirt. She is happy, and yet there is a hollow core at the center of her happiness, and it is hard, sometimes, not to feel its echo. She amends: “I am very nearly perfectly happy.”</p><p>He nods slowly, accepting this answer for what it is, and for what it is not. “If I could change that--”</p><p>“But you cannot.”</p><p>This too he accepts, and looks again out the window. They ride the rest of the way in near silence, with only the heavy clip-clop of the horses’ hooves and the clatter of the carriage wheels over the stones as accompaniment.</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Tout change et grandit en ces lieux</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“... But imperialism by its very nature is anti-socialist. Its spoils benefit neither the people of the Republic nor of the indigent abroad, but only the French elite who already enjoy a disproportionate wealth measured against their countrymen--let alone again the rest of the world! The efforts by <em>certain</em> of those in the Party, not the <em>least</em> of which is M. Vacher de Lapouge, to couch the dehumanization of the colonized in the language of scientific socialism is as offensive to the senses as--”</p><p>The methodical <em>thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag</em> of Raoul’s relentless pacing slows and ceases. Christine glances up from her mending. “I’m raving,” he says. He leans into his cane and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, scrubbing sweat from his flushed face. New ink stains join the old ones on the rumpled scrap of cotton: not from the writing of letters anymore, but from his occupation, typesetting for the Party’s printing press. It is a physical labor; he comes home in the evening exhausted in body and afire in spirit. “Forgive me.”</p><p>“I was listening.” This is only half a lie. Christine sets the partly-mended hem aside and speaks with her hands and her mouth alike. “And forgiveness is not required, M. Party Treasurer. I think your assessment of the colonies accurate and incisive. It does my heart well to hear you speak of these matters with such passion! It leads me to believe the situation may be improved--if men such as you care so deeply about it.” All <em>this</em> is the truth, and she smiles at Raoul’s weary, hopeful look. </p><p>But within her, thoughts dart like frightened birds: from her husband’s radicalist discourse to the pair of secrets locked within her. One secret she might have borne alone, but the double deceit is intolerable--and neither is properly ripe for the sharing. The one is best revealed in the moment of its fullness and not sooner; the other may yet come undone before it becomes real.</p><p>The first: Christine is to sing a solo for the Opéra-Comique--a single aria in a showcase-collection of songs to debut at the Salle Favart in two months’ time. She is only too well aware that she has been invited as much for the soupcon of scandal that her name still carries as for her voice. But a stage is a stage and a song is a song, and this one will be special for more than only its long, long advent.</p><p>And the other: Christine’s monthlies are late. Oh, they have been late before, of course, held back often enough by strain and poor eating. But never so long as this, delayed by an entire month, and then another.</p><p>“--then we might as well give up entirely and join the Possibilists,” Raoul is going on, oh, when did he start up again? She has missed half of it already. “If we are to limit ourselves to any course of action that accepts as axiomatic the necessity of--”</p><p>“Raoul.” She waves, signaling his attention, and signs, this time without speech: <em>I believe I</em>--She does not know any gesture to communicate the idea of <em>pregnancy</em> nor any of its more polite euphemisms, so she hand-spells it, too fast, the letters jumbling one into the next.</p><p>That shuts down the Socialist monologue at once. Something unlocks in her husband’s face, an unguardedness so complete that it hurts her, like looking unexpectedly into the full light of the sun. Just as swiftly it is gone again, back under lock and key. A throb of injustice squeezes her, that she should share so openly, while he holds something back.</p><p>He sits beside her, putting his hand over hers where it rests on the table. “It is less than polite to speak of such things,” he says slowly, “less polite still, I suppose, to know them at all, and I hope you will not think less of me for it. But as Philippe’s brother, it would be have been difficult not to develop a certain understanding with regard to--to the young women he got with child. Of course they had a way they might see to it that, that they need not be troubled with--”</p><p>How he steps around saying the thing outright! She shakes her head, signing where she knows the words, stopping to spell where she does not. “I was in the corps de ballet for three years. I am not an ignorant child now, nor was I then. I helped to care for two of the other girls after their abortions.” And helped bury a third whose surgery was badly botched, in a pauper’s grave, but there is no need to think on that. She also does not mention to him the small pile of francs she amassed in the bottom of her hat-box, across their last months in Lyon and their first year here: her one-time plan against just such an eventuality. “Are our circumstances too dire to admit a child?”</p><p>“Our circumstances--!” He shakes his head. “Your <em>career</em>! I am certain it is only a matter of time before you are called upon to sing again. Have you not waited long enough? I have only eight months until my studies are done and then I expect I can find work with the Party in any city of size, Lyon again if you wish it, or Rouen, or Bordeaux, or--” He shoves himself to his feet. “I will send a note to the surgeon’s office and we shall have this swiftly dealt with.”</p><p>“Raoul, I’m not <em>asking</em>--”</p><p>“The money is no concern.” He is pacing again, <em>thump-drag, thump-drag</em>. He doesn’t even know she is speaking, turned away from her as he is. “We will find a way. I will ask the Party for an advance against my--”</p><p>This is too much of the old Raoul, a decision reached and plans in motion, a towering mansion of assumptions poorly built up over an unsafe foundation. But she is not so much the old Christine to let herself be carried away with him. She slashes one arm through the air, an unmissable demand for attention. He stills, and falls silent. “I am not so fragile, monsieur,” she says, making her stiff lips pliant to shape the words clearly, “as to require you to plan my life out for me without my consultation.”</p><p>He steps closer and sits on the chair opposite her. He lets the cane come to rest against his knee and he signs to her, two-handed: <em>this, you want</em>?</p><p>She nods. She does not need to ask him whether he does, too. “I chose this life,” she says. “The older I grow, the better I understand: there is no true freedom in this world, not really: each soul bound to others, some gladly and some by compulsion, everyone prisoner in some capacity to the need of food and money and shelter.” Now it is she who sounds like a radical. She reaches out her hand and he takes it and presses it, just briefly, before she must pull her fingers back to carry on signing and spelling. “But some are lucky enough to choose the shape of their cages, and if this is mine, I will fit colored glass to the openings between the bars, and have my life filled in on all sides with the most radiant stained-glass windows.”</p><p>He sits on the table before her. “Would you not rather someone do what he could to break the glass, or bend the bars?”</p><p>“You’ve broken glass on my behalf once before, thinking to free me.” She pauses, fingers lighting briefly on the inside of his wrist. “No. I will never let you do so again.”</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Comme autrefois dans la nuit sombre</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“My goodness, madame!” The costumer tuts as, backstage, she rushes to cinch Christine into her gown. Christine wriggles her hips to help slide the skirts into place, straining the filigreed embroidery to its limits. “We’ve had to let this costume out twice already!”</p><p>“I’m sorry, madame. It’s all this good Parisian food,” Christine lies ably. No need to let gossip go running ahead of her just yet. The costumer raises a scrutinizing eyebrow at her, then lets the matter go, helping her to unpin her hair and let her curls tumble down around her face, brushing her cheeks and lips with the excess of rouge that look rather frightful up close but which allow a performer’s expressions to come to life for an audience held at a distance.</p><p>Christine’s heart drums in her chest, too quickly to keep time with the unseen orchestra that accompanies a pair of young sopranos through the Flower Duet from <em>Lakmé</em>. Weeks of giddy preparations have not fully readied her for how it feels to be here again, standing in the curtain-shadowed wings, waiting to step out onto a stage again.</p><p>Raoul is none the wiser, as far as she can tell. The Baroness de Barbezac has been made part of the plan, insisting that the de Chagnys accompany her and the Baron to a concert at the Salle Favart on the occasion of Meg’s birthday. Meg has always made herself a difficult person to say no to, and that is doubly true of the Baroness Marguerite. Though Christine knows that Raoul despises to be made a charity case of, though she knows the spectacle of the opera falls rather outside the scope of what is considered good taste by his colleagues in the Party, she knows too that he could not refuse her this.</p><p>In a borrowed gown and a suit-coat some several years out of fashion, they have been enjoying the concert thus far from the Baron’s box. Or Christine has been enjoying it, at least. At such a great remove from the stage, Raoul cannot possibly read the singers’ lips. While she watches the performance, he watches her.</p><p>But then of course just after the entr’acte, Christine made her excuses; with the changes that her delicate condition has exerted on her body, her husband has no reason to be suspicious of her rapid departure. Meg, as planned, jumped up to join her--thrusting her opera glasses into M. de Chagny’s hands as she went.</p><p>The last notes of the Flower Duet soar, then fade away and before Christine knows it, she is stepping out onto the stage herself. The lights are too bright for her to see the audience, of course, but she can approximate where the Baron’s box is. Has Raoul lifted the borrowed opera glasses to his eye, yet? Or has Meg’s unexpectedly solitary return to her box seat tipped him off that all is not as it seems?</p><p>A bright fanfare from the orchestra cues her. She opens her mouth and sets the music free, the aria <em>Jours de mon enfance</em> from M. de Planard’s <em>Le pré aux clercs</em>. The first few notes emerge disappointingly thin, a testament to the too-brief time she spent warming up her voice beforehand. </p><p>But as the song builds, she builds with it. It is a song of love, and who can sing more truly of love than she? Who understands it better, in all its ebb and flow? The way that its course alters across the flow of the years?</p><p>And besides: her voice alone is not her only instrument now. Her hands dart and fly, flexing and reaching; her arms circle and bend. Each gesture is broad and expansive; legible, she hopes, even to the cheap seats at the top of the mezzanine--let alone to those watching from the proximity of a wealthy patron’s box seats. Her hands sing, but they dance too: she was a dancer, too, was she not, before she ever stepped into a lead soprano’s role?</p><p>The years fall away as she explores the extent of her range, shaping sound with the curve of her mouth, the play of her breath. By the time she strikes the closing high note, it feels as if mere moments have passed, as if she had closed her eyes upon the Opéra Populaire’s stage and opened them to find herself here instead. <br/>Remembering herself, she bends her neck in a modest courtesy. The applause is somewhere between enthusiastic and merely <em>polite</em>; and perhaps a little confused. That’s fine. Christine is not singing for <em>them</em>.</p><p>For a moment a shadow slides between her and the lights. Her breath snags in her throat. Of course it is no specter, only the cellist standing up in the orchestra to adjust his instrument. Still, the spell is broken; Christine ducks one more inelegant courtesy and retreats from the stage. She is not sure what her one-time tutor would have made of this performance, from its unsteady opening to her signed accompaniment, which he surely would have called a detriment and a distraction from her voice itself.</p><p>A pang in her chest. It is not for him that she has sung tonight, either. It is for herself; and for herself she is overcome with joy and a pride that would never stoop to consider itself a mortal sin.</p><p>Once she is back in her borrowed gown and her hair pinned up again in loose waves, as befitting a married woman, she returns to the opera box. Raoul is half turned away from the stage: waiting for her shadow to mark the box’s entrance again. Their eyes meet; his chest rises, as if to speak, but his mouth does not open.</p><p>And then Meg’s sharp ears catch Christine’s footfall and the young baroness springs up to embrace her, brimming over with exultations with that raise a blush in Christine’s cheeks. From the box adjacent, another theater patron issues a hissed request for silence, and the women are obliged to return to their seats. <br/>Without looking, Christine puts her hand into the space between her seat and the next. Raoul’s is already there, waiting. They look sidelong at each other; he smiles slightly and shakes his head, nodding toward the stage where a long-faced tenor has embarked onto one of Zurga’s solos from <em>Les pêcheurs des perles</em>.</p><p>It is only later, after the final aria has been showered in applause, after the interminable farewells in the Opera entrance, later, after the long slow walk home, that Christine finds herself with, at last, the empty space in which to speak of the concert--and none of the peace of mind required to do so. Something like her old stage fright scratches at her diaphragm as she sets her coat aside, while Raoul locks the door behind them. “Thank you for coming with me, tonight,” she signs, when he glances back at her over his shoulder. In the yellow glow of the kerosene flame, her hands cast long shadows. “I know it isn’t the way you might have chosen to pass an evening...”</p><p>There is a strange sharpness of sound, in the click of the key in the lock, the whisper of its weight when added to the pile of papers on the table by the door; the tap of Raoul’s cane as it comes to a leaning rest against the wall; the <em>notes inégales</em> of his steps, long-short pairs like the swinging eighths of an American ragtime waltz. </p><p>There is something of the predator in the way he stalks toward her: the precision of movement, the unguarded hunger. But there is nothing of prey in Christine, there is a wildness, a ferocity, that rises in her breast and bubbles up like overwarm champagne. She does not wait by the wall but meets him midway. They crash into each other so hard that it drives the air from her lungs. She draws fresh breath from his open mouth, anchors her hands in his shirt-front as his find her shoulders and neck, the flushed skin left bare by the cut of the borrowed gown. </p><p>Together they spin, two bodies sharing an orbit around the bright blazing sun of desire. Here a glove drifts to the floor in a whisper of silk; there flutters a suit-jacket, a shirt. The borrowed gown is a puddle of green velvet, the tumble of her petticoats a cloud gone to ground. Her breasts ache pleasantly when he crushes her against him once more, skin warm against skin despite the apartment's chill. They do not speak a word, not with mouths nor fingers, but their hands dance, a pas de deux whose steps are older than time, and Christine sings again too, for herself again and an unhearing audience as well: a breathy tremolo in place of her full tessitura, <em>sotto voce e sostenato</em>.</p><p>Later, as they lie entangled in the lace of their own dried sweat, softening into the space between waking life and sleep, Christine’s mind wanders. She measures the point and counterpoint of their breathing, the intuitive call and answer. Her lips brush her husband’s shoulder; he stirs but does not open his eyes. She is alone, for now, in her reverie. That is not unexpected. There are some paths down which even love cannot follow.</p><p>Did she think her performance at Salle Favart would blunt the sharp edges of her hunger? It has only honed them to a razor point.</p><p>And then inside her, for the first time, she feels the child move.</p><p>Her hand finds the hard swell below her navel, the press of a tiny elbow or foot. Is it the stirring of her own feelings that has caused the child to quicken tonight? Her thumb strokes her belly, as if she can soothe the infant through her own skin. <em>Don’t fear</em>, she tells the small, restless spirit insider her. <em>Sleep sweetly, and be patient. </em></p><p>There is love enough inside of her to be amply shared.</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. C'est de ta douleur</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Labor is, in its greatest part, a game of patience, the de Chagny apartment remade into a waiting-room. Christine would like her husband at her side, but he has been banished by the midwife to the apartment hall. “The men are always too nervous anyway,” the midwife says dismissively, “and we don’t need you nervous, now, do we, dear?”</p>
<p>Nervousness is a gown that Christine has long since outgrown. She is not <em>nervous</em>, she is <em>afraid</em>--of the hurt that is to come, yes, but of more than that too. So many women die in the birthing-bed, so many women enter this world squalling and bloodstained only to depart it the very same way. All she wishes to do is lie abed and breathe into the pain, when it slips like a knife up beneath her navel--she is a singer, she knows how to breathe, at least, when to draw air and when it let it go. But the midwife insists on hauling her up and making her walk, in the loose time between contractions. So she walks, and she talks, of idle things, whatever springs to mind to distract her from the ache between her legs and the too-fragile thread of her own mortality: pâté with mustard, her father’s violin, the out-of-tune pianoforte in Meg’s sitting-room, the smell of good Castille soap, the dreadful stains in her underclothes from the blood that surprised her now and again during her confinement.</p>
<p>That last earns her a sharp look from the midwife. “Bleeding? That is not normal, madame. Did no one tell you?”</p>
<p>Christine’s family is dead and Raoul’s distanced. Who should have told her what to expect from her changing body? “Why?” she demands, as the invisible knife slides into her again. “What does it mean?”</p>
<p>The midwife eases her down to a seat upon the bed. “It means,” she says sternly, but with the confidence of her years, “that I am going to have to go to more than the usual amount of trouble keeping you and this babe in good health.”</p>
<p>Christine’s hard round belly is the beckoning moon and pain is the tide that builds and recedes, reaching higher with each new cycle. She will die of this labor, she is certain of it; despite all the great things she has left undone, or because of them.</p>
<p>Raoul is there, cool fingers on her flushed brow, slipping little slivers of ripe pear between her lips; no, he is gone; no, someone is arguing with the midwife--oh, it is Christine herself. Time grows sweat-slippery and she loses hold of the hours. She paces, she groans, she submits to the midwife’s intimate examinations. “Not long now, madame,” the midwife promises, but <em>long</em> has no meaning here; “soon, madame,” but <em>soon</em> and <em>never</em> are the same; “bear down, madame! With your breath, now: bear down!”</p>
<p>Christine sobs, once, less because of the pain and more because she is so very <em>tired</em>. But the lightning-strike has split her open and now there is a little space to breathe, a little room inside her for her own spirit. “Again, madame,” urges the midwife, and Christine strains again, against herself, and each new breath unwinds something deep within her.</p>
<p>“There,” the midwife breathes, “there, now,” and her face is soft, and she is holding something in her arms, <em>someone</em>, oh, who is that she is she holding in her arms? She swipes her finger to clear the babe’s mouth and shouts, “M’sieur! I need you!”</p>
<p>“He c-can’t,” Christine gasps. She wants to hold the baby, her baby, but she is trembling. She does not trust her own arms, she cannot. “He can’t hear you.”</p>
<p>The midwife makes an exasperated noise and stomps her foot on the floorboards, three times. In the hallway there is a brief commotion and the door crashes open. “Christine,” Raoul says, hand still on the door, not quite in the room yet and no longer in the hall.</p>
<p>“Come here, m’sieur, and hold this child!” The midwife beckons him and thrusts the baby into his arms when he is close enough. “Now, here--” Her fingers jab like a fish-hook in Christine’s belly; Christine moans but is too weary by far to try to escape the torment. “You are almost through, madame,” the midwife encourages, and with her free hand she is pulling, something hot and wet slithers free of Christine and lands wetly on the floor. The midwife retrieves this mass of red so dark it is nearly black, and laughs as she spreads it on the white sheets. “The placenta is whole, God be blessed!”</p>
<p>“She’s bleeding,” Raoul says, his voice high and tight, and when Christine rolls her head to look at him he is pale. His mother was one of those women who never rose from the birthing bed. A brief, bright rage flares up in Christine, that he should wrest this fear away from her and claim it for his own. But she is too tired to cling to anger, too. Oh, she wishes she could. She needs something to cling to, now.</p>
<p>“Bleeding, yes, but no more than is to be expected.” Raoul follows the line of Christine’s eyes and realizes the midwife is speaking. She straightens up to dampen a clean rag in the basin of clear water at the bedside, and now he can see her face. “This is no hemorrhage, I assure you. And I’ll see to it that doesn’t change. Now comfort your wife! She has labored a long time on your behalf.”</p>
<p>Christine’s eyes have closed against the midwife’s ministrations to her tender, bruised body. Even so, she feels gravity shift, worlds realigning, when her husband settles beside her on the bed. He kisses her brow, where the sweat has not yet dried. “A girl,” he whispers, one finger tracing the small pink shell of an ear. “The very image of her mother.”</p>
<p>A girl.</p>
<p>A sob heaves out of Christine. How cruel of her to desire this, how cruel to let it come to pass. She knows so very well the lot in life that will be afforded to this child, she can all but sketch the portraits of the men to whom her daughter will be obliged for her care and well-being, can see the shape of the cage into which she has been born. Before the girl can take her first sleep in life, Christine mourns the dreams she will have that will never come to pass.</p>
<p>Raoul mistakes the source of her sorrow. “Here, here,” he murmurs. Gently, reluctantly, he settles the child, <em>their</em> child, in her arms. Christine holds the tiny, sharp-smelling bundle tightly--too tightly? How to know? When has she cradled a babe before?--and Raoul holds her, in turn.</p>
<p>Her weeping subsides while the midwife whisks the baby away to clean her and wrap her in fresh swaddling. By the time she is returned to Christine’s arms, Christine is calm enough to study the small wrinkled face, searching for the resemblance that Raoul has claimed. </p>
<p>In truth she recognizes nothing there, sees none of the lines of her own nose and cheekbones, nor the color of her husband’s eyes. This child could as easily be a changeling as her own bone and blood; her eyes are all wrong, so old and and unblinking, filled with doubt despite her terrible newness in this world. She studies Christine in turn, and her pink tongue thrusts between her lips. </p>
<p>She doesn’t cry. Christine had expected her to cry. Perhaps <em>she</em> has cried enough for them both.</p>
<p>“She needs to eat, madame,” coaxes the midwife. “Here, now. Show her the way.”</p>
<p>Had Christine believed she was done with pain for the day? How can this child’s toothless gums hurt so much? The midwife fusses, adjusting Christine’s hands, the curve of her arm. Finally she contrives an arrangement that, while hardly comfortable, no longer draws fresh tears up from the well of Christine’s exhaustion. Christine settles into the steady rhythm of the baby’s gulps, skimming lightly over the surface of sleep. </p>
<p>This, at last, is something of her daughter that she can understand, can relate to: the insatiable hunger that burns just beyond the last ragged edge of understanding.</p>
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<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Ne regarde pas en arrière</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>IT'S FINISHED! Thank you so much to everyone who's kindly left kudos or comments on this--especially degasballerina, who's been there from the start! Writing can be a very isolating work and it's lovely to feel you're connecting with readers this way. &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>An inexorable pattern takes over the apartment across the coming days: eat, nurse, sleep, nurse, eat, launder the diapers, nurse. Christine is crushed to the margins of her own life. Some days she does not bother to dress, or to comb her hair; why should she? What would she be dressing <em>for</em>? She can step into the role of a happy young mother for the space of a visit from Meg, who always arrives with a cry of delight and an overstuffed lunch-basket. No more than that, though. She has not the strength.</p><p>Raoul tries to understand, and cannot; how could he? The spheres that men pass through are not the same ones through which women must move. The walls of the apartment do not stake out the very horizons of his world. Christine is trapped within the confines of a cramped stage, performing an endlessly repetitive opera, consistently outsung by a prima donna whose demands are boundless and who has not yet grown into the gift of patience; one who makes La Carlotta seem the very image of forbearance in comparison. </p><p>“You should sing to her,” Raoul encourages. Or does he plead? Wheedle? Emotions are hard to untangle from a great distance and Christine feels herself at a terrible remove from the little apartment, her threadbare soul straining at the end of its tether to her weariness-weighted body. In any case no song rises to meet her, when she looks down into her daughter’s round pink face. She knows no melody that quite seems to fit, no musical key to unlock the feelings too deep inside her to reach.</p><p>The nights are too short, chopped up into shallow fragments of restive sleep. The days are too long, Christine and her daughter left to themselves, except perhaps for a brief unsatisfying trip down to the shops. Then the silence that stretches from morning to evening, shattered only by wordless squalling.</p><p>It becomes difficult to rise from the bed some days, or not to return back there after the exhaustion of breakfast, shopping, laundry. When Raoul returns from work, he steps lightly, in case she has already collapsed into something like rest. Sometimes, he brings home an orange, or a few anise pastilles, which he leaves on the pillow beside her like an offering, or a question. Sometimes, he has the midwife in for a house call, and once a proper doctor too, but there is nothing wrong with her, these each report in turn, nothing wrong, not <em>really</em>.</p><p>The little apartment is a dark, haunted cave and though Raoul has come for her once again, to carry her back up to waking life, he cannot reach here there; this time she is lost in those depths, submerged in the murky lake, no hope of being found, so deep that air and light seem less a memory than a glimmer of fiction.</p><p>Sometimes, when she drifts in this haze between stretches of waking sleep, she hears the bed creak beside her, feels the electric line of borrowed warmth against her side. Sometimes she hears him say, into her hair: “Come back. Come back to me.”</p><p>The pretense of sleep saves her from having to respond.</p><p>It is a warm afternoon in the late summer, with sunlight trickling in through the dirty windows, when Christine finds herself, sitting against the wall, watching her daughter suck on her own fingers. While Christine’s eyes are on her, the baby rolls onto her side, then palms the rug once or twice. Then she works her fat little knees under her body and pushes up to a sit. She looks across the room at Christine, and gives her a wet, pleased grin.</p><p>Christine’s daughter is six months old and Christine feels she is seeing her for the first time. </p><p><em>Christine’s daughter</em>. She has a name, and to name a thing is to grant it power. Christine lets herself use it. “Perséphone,” she whispers, through cracked lips. Perséphone--Séphie, it will have to be Séphie, dear God, what were they thinking, saddling such a small creature with so much name, even if it is lovely one?--rocks back and forth and squawks, delighting in the sound of her own voice, and why should she not, such a fine voice, a sturdy one, that it is?</p><p>Christine drags herself across the room. She hauls the baby onto her lap. “Hello,” she whispers, enduring and adoring a joyful yank of her hair, a curious questing finger in her eye. “Hello.”</p><p>A year cannot be made only of summers, and Christine cannot stay forever in that one perfect moment of joy. For a spell, there are more days than not when the bedcovers are still too heavy, when she cannot remember how to laugh nor how to cry. There are days when she can hold Séphie and treasure her, and there are days when she can only mourn the months she has missed. But the good days tumble together closer and closer.</p><p>And yet--even after there are more days of sun in her life than there are of fog and cold, the music still recedes from Christine, every time she looks at Séphie’s face. There is no song that quite fits, nothing that says all the things she wishes she knew how to say. It is an absence that aches, and Christine does not know with what to fill it.</p><p>It is only by accident that, one day, as she sweeps, she knocks over Raoul’s satchel by the door. Out tumbles an unbound manuscript for the printer upon which he has been jotting notes about margin size and orphaned lines, along with a pair of poorly-cleaned pen nibs.</p><p>Christine sinks to her knees, looking at these things where they have fallen, touching them lightly, as if the spilled satchel is an animal in whose entrails she may read of things to come.</p><p>There exists no song she knows that she feels she can rightly give to her daughter.</p><p>But if she were to start from scratch and frame the tune to fit...</p><p>She takes the nibs, and a pen and blotter and ink as well, and turns to the front of the manuscript, where there is an unmarked page. Her hand is steady as she draws a series of long black lines across the page’s width, five, and then five more directly below. The bars of a cage, at first glance; upon a longer look, it becomes a ladder to a new world of possibility.</p><p>By the time Raoul returns from work, she has the skeleton of a first verse marked out. He finds her huddled at the table, with Séphie on her lap. Séphie is chewing on the hem of Christine’s dress, both mother’s and daughter’s hands are lightly smeared with ink. “Look,” Christine says, and signs, too, <em>look</em>. She has no more words than that; she has poured the rest of them into this labor.</p><p>But he is already looking, down on his good knee beside the table, his fingers skimming lightly over the just-dried notes that she has marked. Above the musical staff, she has scrawled a working title: <em>Do not look back in sorrow</em>. While Raoul examines her work, his head is at the level of her eyes; for how long has there been so much gray in his hair? </p><p><em>You sing?</em> he asks her with his hands, without looking at her. His mouth is tight, as if to speak would mean letting go of more than just words, things he is not yet ready to part with.</p><p>She does. She does sing. She holds Séphie close and spins her about the apartment, and Séphie shrieks her excitement, and when Christine runs out of song--there is so little of it, yet--Raoul catches her up and they turn together, all three of them. He cannot lift her, spin her in the air, as once he could; Christine’s feet stay on the ground. But her heart, her heart, is soaring.</p><p>Later, once the baby has been fed and nestled into her trundle-bed, Raoul produces more paper and Christine begins to mark down the outline of an opera. Let it be Eurydice again, she thinks. But not the unfettered, bruising tragedy of <em>Orfeo ed Euridice</em>, and not a farce or a joke as in <em>Orphée aux enfers</em>. </p><p>Brush Orpheus himself away from center stage, in fact. Nudge Eurydice forward. Let her have her own voice, tell her own story. Let her love Orpheus, this fortunate one, touched by the gods; and let her lose him. Let her be gathered up by Lord Hades into death’s kingdom and let her come to this god’s special favor, the king of shadows, king of songs; for if Orpheus’s gift is granted by the gods, then it should not be from the gods that the purest melody flows? </p><p>Let it be a battle of wills between them then, woman and god, a challenge, a give-and-take. Let her spirit not be bent by its voyage into the underworld. Let her presence bring light into the underworld, bring joy to those other souls that will never again see the light of day, but which may be touched by its memory when it shines through her song. And so when Orpheus comes seeking her (as Orpheus always must do, in order that he remain Orpheus and not some lesser man) let her choice to return to the world-above be a conflicted one.</p><p>Raoul is quiet when she describes this last to him, and remains quiet while she describes the journey upward, when Orpheus cannot bear his doubt any longer and turns, certain that she has chosen, after all, to stay in the god’s realm below. When the lovers lock eyes, and Orpheus sees in his wife’s face the reflection of his failure, then here appears the aria which she has begun to write, a gentle farewell from Eurydice: <em>Do not look back in sorrow.</em> </p><p>“Yes, I can see why it must be so,” Raoul says, when she pauses. “Eurydice deserves no less than to be queen, though I would wish she had a sunnier realm in which to rule.”</p><p>Christine shakes her head, her pen still scratching deep marks in the paper. “Be patient. The story is not so swiftly ended as that.” Eurydice must make her way back to the underworld, accompanied by the silent ferryman; and she must confront Lord Hades with the cruelty of his bargain. If she must return in failure, let her confront him with his own, too.</p><p>But look, what is this concealed behind Hades’ sweeping cloak? It is Orpheus himself. He has broken his harp and strangled himself in the strings, for if she cannot follow him up to the sun-brightened world, then he will stay with her in the darkness, a life for a life, a death for a death, a whole unparted, a love battered yet unbroken.</p><p>There at last the pen falls from her fingers, and excitement’s fevered pitch leaves her cold and trembling when it recedes. She does not resist when Raoul guides her out of her chair and puts his hands around her waist. “It is an apt choice,” Raoul says. Her arms clasp loosely behind his neck. “I think Orpheus would have given that much and more, for her.”</p><p>She pulls back from him, so he can see her face. “I know he would. Whether or not she wished it of him. It is a bittersweet ending I have put to this story, not a happy one.”</p><p>“More sweet than bitter, perhaps.” The well-creased lines around his eyes fold deeper. “I believe that Eurydice would have had better success bringing Orpheus back from the underworld than the other way around; indeed, I think it likely she already has, and does not even realize it. The fault on that account lies with Orpheus, though, wretched man that he is, if he has not told her so clearly and honestly.”</p><p>With that, he nocks her head under his chin again and they hang there together for a spell, faintly swaying with the music that Christine can still hear in her heart. There is a kiss, the gentle parting of lips, touches that whisper lightly over hair, along the curve of a breast or the hard angle of a shoulder. But they are both bone-tired and there is no more than that. Love cannot always be a grand symphony; sometimes it is a weary working song, hummed to oneself.</p><p>Before the lamps go down for the night, Christine looks over her handiwork once more. It is an epic but barely begun, and the two scrawled-upon pages before her seem suddenly very small. One tiny step in a long, breathless race.</p><p>But she will finish it. One day. She will. She will have that much to show for herself, when all is said and done.</p><p>Tonight when she collapses into bed, her exhaustion is total, but it is a wholesome weariness, not a hollow one. She leans over the edge of the bed to touch Séphie’s soft, warm cheek. Then she settles in beside Raoul, their bodies rolling together at the center of the cheap mattress. He is already asleep, or near enough to it. She slides her hand up inside his pyjama shirt and leaves it to rest in the middle of his chest, finding the soft slow pulse beneath her palm. His eyelids flicker, but do not open. “Ne regarde pas en arrière avec de la douleur,” she sings softly, to him and to herself. There is a good man there beside her, and perhaps they will spend all their lives going down to hell and carrying one another back up again, and it will be terrible and wonderful and always worth the journey; there is so much, so much, yet to come and they will face all that together too and she will do it with a song in her mouth; a song, at last, of her own. A song that is true.</p><p>Christine does not look back, she looks ahead down the long curving road of the future. As sleep carries her downward to dreams, she smiles to feel herself peering into the face of happiness; and to recognize there an old friend, the dearest and most familiar of companions.</p>
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